Books
An opportunity, via two workshops, to work with ArtsFuse Poetry Critic Daniel Bosch on making poems.
“The main idea I’ve been working with is what I call the longevity revolution.” — Theodore Roszak
Two inviting collections of short short stories in translation — Catalan writer Quim Monzó sees fiction as an exhilarating if ingenious prison, Israeli writer Alex Epstein pens dreamy micro-yarns that free the imagination.
There are moments in Hideous Progeny (especially early in the second half) that grip and move the audience. But there are not enough of them. I dare this gifted troupe of theater makers to be more inventive, take greater risks, and live up to their so obvious promise. Hideous Progeny by Emily Dendinger. Staged by…
The Chester Theatre Company’s production, directed by Ron Bashford, runs over two hours with nary a dull moment and the actors seem to be having as wonderful a time as the audience.
“To End All Wars” embodies its themes –- the decline of the aristocracy, the rise of propaganda, the transformation of war-making, the heroism of resistance –- so skillfully in a dozen or so major characters and another dozen minor ones that this history of the First World War reads like a lively group biography.
There is nothing shocking, nothing sensational, nothing revelatory, in this workmanlike production of ARMS AND THE MAN. Nor should there be, as the play doesn’t give much room for innovation.
The wily Enrique Vila-Matas remains wary but respectful of Ernest Hemingway and asserts his independence by going on his own self-consciously vaudevillian way—Juan Gabriel Vásquez is too subservient to elude the shadow of Joseph Conrad.
The theme of fading passion would have been enough. It is the theme of many a love story. It would have been enough for this chess story. But author Robert R. Desjarlais won’t let it be enough.
Book Review: Violence, a la the Freudian and Biblical canon
Short Fuse thinks Russell Jacoby’s “Bloodlust: On the Roots of Violence from Cain and Abel to the Present” is an unconvincing mix of refurbished Freudianism and Genesis.
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